Chapter 3

At Flores, in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville Lay

In the wake of the failed Lisbon expedition, Sir John Hawkins set about devising a new maritime strategy, based on the principle ‘that first we have as little to do in foreign countries as may be (but of mere necessity), for that breedeth great charge and no profit at all’.¹ It proved to be one of the enduring themes of English foreign policy down the centuries.

The plan involved maintaining small squadrons of Queen’s ships, with supporting vessels, between Spain and the Azores during the sailing season of the Spanish treasure-carrying flotas, coming from the Indies.

Up to this point the English had shown very little strategic imagination … But in 1590 a new approach can be glimpsed, which was to have a long and distinguished future in naval strategy. John Hawkins and Martin Frobisher were commissioned to cruise off the coast of Spain in order to intercept all ships passing to or from the Indies … More important, they remained on station for seven months, being victualled at sea. They took virtually no prizes, but paralysed that aspect of Spanish commerce, an unsung exploit which testifies to the high level of discipline which could be maintained, and points to the whole fleet consisting of royal ships … the strategy of blockade which it represented was still the dominant element in naval policy at the time of the Napoleonic wars.²

To be successful, the plan required a well-organized relay of relief vessels so as not to leave a gap for the Spaniards to slip through. It also presupposed that the Spanish would be deterred by the English rather than just sweeping them out of the way.

The Spanish had not failed to learn some lessons from the Armada débâcle and were not only rebuilding their fleet but designing new super-ships that could more than match the English ships for strength and speed – these included twelve massive new galleons (the Twelve Apostles), designed on English lines, and a collection of gallizabras, a fast and deadly warship that could outsail anything it could not defeat.

Neither the 1589 nor the 1590 flotas were intercepted by the English but the Spaniards were indeed deterred by the presence of two English squadrons, one off the Azores under the command of Frobisher in the Revenge, and one off the coast of Spain under Hawkins.

Although some bullion was transported in 1591 between February and March, in frigates specially built in Havana, the main flota left much later in the year, the intention being to wait until the English ran out of supplies and also for Bazán to gather a strong enough fleet off the Azores to escort it home.

This time the English sent out twenty ships and pinnaces under the command of Lord Howard. Sir Walter Raleigh had originally planned to go but in the event was replaced by Sir Richard Grenville. Howard sailed in the Defiance, 600 tons, and Grenville in the Revenge; Richard Crosse commanded the Bonaventure, 600 tons; Sir Edward Denny commanded the Nonpareil, 600 tons; while other smaller ships included the Charles and the Moon, of 60 and 70 tons respectively, the Bark Raleigh and some pinnaces.

The Cornishman Sir Richard Grenville was something of a wild card in this line-up. He did not have the reputation to rank him among seamen such as Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher or even Lord Thomas Howard, and in fact, unlike the aforementioned, he had not even taken part in the defeat of the Armada. He had been responsible for organizing the defences of the west of England and had been employed more recently in Ireland.

Grenville was described by the Spanish ambassador as a ‘notable pirate’ and his exploits and behaviour did everything to support his fearsome reputation. A Spanish ship that dared to attack Grenville on his return from a voyage to Virginia in October 1585 was overpowered. Since Grenville lacked a boat with which to board her, he put together a raft made of old chests and rowed across on that, the raft disintegrating as they boarded the vessel.

This pugnacious, somewhat unhinged, attitude to the enemy, and Spaniards in particular, valuable as it may have been when directed appropriately in the heat of battle, was to be the decisive factor in the fate of one of the Navy Royal’s finest warships, the first Revenge.

Grenville was sometimes as unpopular among his own men as he was with the Spanish. He was arrogant, overbearing, hot-tempered and argumentative and, if this were not enough, he was also conceited about his knight-chivalric lineage which placed him a cut above the run-of-the-mill English admirals, by birth if nothing else.

According to Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, Grenville was ‘a man of fierce temper, very unquiet in his mind and greatly affected to war. His own people hated him for his fierceness and spoke very hardly of him.’³

Ralph Lane, governor of the new Virginia colony, wrote to Walsingham about Grenville’s ‘intolerable pride, and insatiable ambition’.⁴ Although Lane also had a reputation for being quarrelsome, in Grenville’s case his complaint seems to have been justified.

It seems, however, that rays of sunlight sometimes penetrated this somewhat thundery picture. Philip Gawdy, a young gentleman volunteer, wrote to his brother in Norfolk in more flattering terms:

The Queen hath commanded all speed to be made. Sir Richard and other captains will presently go to court with whom I will go. And so away as fast as the ships will fall down the Thames. I have already bought my arms and target, the very fellows to my Lord Thomas and Sir Richard. My apparel will be made tonight, what is necessary else I do provide besides the great kindness I find both at Sir Richard’s hands and at Mr Langhorne’s [captain of the soldiers aboard Revenge].⁵

Grenville returned the compliment by writing on the margin of another letter of Gawdy’s to his brother that ‘not sickness, no danger, no fear … nor no extremities of weather, mutiny hard[ship] or other peril or grief could provoke’⁶ him from his duty.

When Lord Thomas’s squadron sailed in April it ran into what Captain Langhorne described as ‘the extremest fury of the weather’ which forced them all to take shelter in Falmouth, apart, of course, from Grenville, who continued in the teeth of the gale, riding it out between Scilly and Ushant. According to Gawdy: ‘We spent both our masts, but by God’s grace, they were espied in good time and strengthened with fishes, wolding and caulking, and now, thanks be to God, they be in very good plight.’⁷

Having weathered the storm, Revenge then sailed on to the rendezvous off Cape St Vincent, where Lord Howard’s ships were to cruise, awaiting the arrival of the treasure fleets from Havana.

On about 18 April, Revenge captured a large Hanseatic hulk off the Berlengas, carrying about £10,000 worth of masts, timber and other stores, which were required for Philip’s fleet. Having discovered that four of the treasure-frigates they had been awaiting had in fact already reached Spain, the English sent their prize home and headed for the Azores.

In England, there was a flurry of activity, as, fearing another Armada, Henry Palmer’s squadron in the Channel was reinforced, a fleet of privateers was raised by Sir Walter Raleigh in the West Country and the Earl of Cumberland put to sea with his own squadron. Two Queen’s ships, the Lion, George Fenner, and the Foresight, Thomas Vavasour, sailed to reinforce Lord Howard. Seven London merchantmen, the Susan, Centurion, Cherubim, Mayflower, Margaret, John and Corselet also left Plymouth Sound to join Howard.

Lord Howard’s rendezvous was south-west of the island of Flores, where he planned to lie in wait for the treasure fleet until 30 August. According to Gawdy, he was ‘almost famished for want of prey, or rather like a bear robber of her whelps’.⁸ In the absence not only of the enemy but also of provisions and reinforcements, Howard had no choice but to abandon station and head for Flores, to take on water and give his crews some rest and medical attention. They also set about replacing the old soiled ballast in the ship, by now a repository for infection, cleaning the ship and replacing it with new ballast from the island.

Don Alonso de Bazán, meanwhile, had sailed from Spain and arrived at the island of Terceira, some miles to the east of Flores, on 15 August. They had been sighted by Captain Middleton in one of the Duke of Cumberland’s pinnaces, who managed to warn Howard on 31 August. By then, however, it was almost too late. Howard’s men were still ashore, embarking fresh water, ballast and provisions, when at about 5 o’clock in the evening the Spanish were seen rounding the island.

Howard had time to get his men ashore before weighing anchor, and some of his ships were forced to slip their cables, in their haste to get away. Howard managed to work his way to windward and was able to put himself out of immediate harm’s way. Revenge was the last to weigh anchor.

There has been some speculation as to the delay. Raleigh’s view was that Grenville simply took longer than the others to recover his men, of which ninety were diseased. There seems nothing remarkable in this. However, as his account goes on, Grenville’s singular personality begins to impose itself. Urged by the master and others to cut his main sail, Grenville refused:

to turne from the enemy, alleging that he would rather choose to die, than to dishonour himself, his country, and her Majesty’s ship, persuading his company that he would pass through two squadrons, in despite of them: and enforce those of Seville to give him way. Which he performed upon diverse of the foremost, who as the mariners term it, sprung their luff, and fell under the lee of the Revenge. But the other course had been the better, and might well have been answered in so great an impossibility of prevailing. Nothwithstanding out of the greatness of his mind, he could not be persuaded.⁹

What Raleigh describes as ‘greatness of mind’ might otherwise be described as stubbornness or foolhardiness:

deep down … at the root of the man, there was, surely, an element of unbalance, of overstrain. It comes out in his impulsive temper, terrifying to his subordinates, which made him unloved where Drake was adored. It is not without significance that his very first appearance upon the public scene was an act of manslaughter.¹⁰

As the Spaniards came upon the single English ship, first the San Phelipe and then the San Barnabé under General Bertendona grappled the Revenge. According to the Spanish relation, the San Phelipe managed to put ten soldiers aboard the Revenge. According to Raleigh, despite the fact that there were no soldiers or marines aboard the Revenge, the Spanish attempts at boarding were successfully repulsed by her crew. However, the Spaniards at one point invaded Revenge’s poop deck, captured her ensign and had some limited success before the San Barnabé had to sheer off due to the damage she had received.

Two more Spanish galleons took her place and the men of Revenge fired on them as best they could with muskets and grenades. Not only that, but the San Phelipe also received a broadside of crossbar shot from Revenge and as other galleons came up, Revenge wreaked vengeance upon them; the Ascensión and Cuitino’s flagship were both sunk.

A brave little ship, the Pilgrim, under Jacob Whiddon, a Plymouth man, hovered near the Revenge in the forlorn hope of rendering assistance, ‘but in the morning bearing with the Revenge, was hunted like a hare amongst ravenous hounds but escaped’.¹¹

The decks of the Revenge resembled a charnel house, with dead and wounded bodies lying amidst a confusion of broken masts and tangled rigging. Of the 100 men who had been fit to fight at the beginning of the battle, forty had now been killed and most of the remainder were wounded.

Grenville himself was among the more seriously wounded. He had received a musket shot in the body during the night and was hit again on the head while his surgeon was dressing his wound. The surgeon himself was killed.

Although undefeated, Sir Richard Grenville recognized that the situation was hopeless. Rather than surrender, however, he took a similar decision to the German captain of the Graf Spee 348 years later: he decided to scuttle the ship rather than hand her over to the enemy, although this would mean drowning himself and his crew.

Although he found an ally for this plan in the master gunner, he could not persuade the captain of the ship or the master, and their resistance was vindicated when the Spanish General, Don Alfonso Bazán, agreed to grant the crew safe passage to England, ‘the better sort to pay such reasonable ransom as their estate would bear, and in the mean season to be free from gallery or imprisonment’.

Having failed to deny Her Majesty’s Ship to the Spaniards, Sir Richard was indifferent to his own safety and replied to Alonso Bazán ‘that he might do with his body what he list, for he esteemed it not’. None the less, he was carried, swooning, out of the ship to be received with considerable respect and admiration by the enemy.

Grenville survived two or three days but at last his wounds overcame him.

According to John Huyghen Van Linschoten, a resident of the island of Terceira, even at this point Grenville’s indomitable spirit did not desert him. But, although he bequeathed his own memory in exalted terms, he was somewhat less complimentary about those who had fought with him:

Here die I Richard Grenville with a joyful and quiet mind, for I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do, that hath fought for his country, Queen, religion, and honour: whereby my soul most joyfully departeth out of this body; and shall leave behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier that hath done his duty, as he was bound to do. But the others of my company have done as traitors and dogs, for which they shall be reproached all their lives and leave a shameful name for ever.¹²

There seem to be two readings of Sir Richard Grenville: on the one hand we see a man who, although unable to take part in the fight against the Armada himself, was imbued with such a spirit of love for his country that he would fling himself like a tiger at the enemy wherever he found him.

The Spaniards, indeed, continued to pose a dire threat to England, perhaps even more so now that they were equipped with the new super ships, the ‘Twelve Apostles’. In the resolute opinion of Sir Richard Grenville, the enemy must not only be engaged more closely but at every possible opportunity. Such a reading might suggest that the final sentence of Grenville’s dying soliloquy was aimed at Lord Howard and the rest of the English fleet that had allowed the winds of caution to fill their sails, and allowed discretion to overrule valour. In his view, they had failed their country.

On the other hand, the whole episode may be seen as typical of a man blinded by rage who put his ship and his crew at risk out of sheer foolhardiness, when he could well have slipped away from the immediate threat with the rest of the fleet in order to preserve a valuable ship and fight another day. Under this view, the final sentence reads not so much as patriotic dismay but as vindictive fury that his will had been thwarted. This crew, many of whom had fought to the death, taking a heavy toll among the Spanish galleons ranged against them, were not to be spared a lashing from their master’s tongue for good measure.

Neither one of these readings appears to suffice on its own. Grenville’s patriotism was bound up inextricably with his personality and neither the Spaniards nor his own crew were likely to be spared the effects of his whirling-dervish temper. If the Spaniards were present, they must be attacked; and if his crew disobeyed his orders they must be vilified, even if this vilification should have to be conveyed on his dying breath.

Sir Richard Grenville is the hero of the hawks and the enemy of the doves. Winston Churchill would have valued his mettle, if not his tactical nous. Grenville was a man of action and he saw his duty in straightforward terms. He was not a Protestant zealot, it just so happened that Spanish Catholics were the enemies of his Queen and were therefore his enemies. The Spaniards themselves described him as ‘el Almirante de los mayors marineros y cosarios de Inglaterra gran hereje y perseguidor de catholicos’.

The last fight of the Revenge became an epic in the annals of English history as it epitomized, perhaps even more than the fight against the Armada, the spirit of resistance of a small nation faced with a larger foe. Tennyson is conscious of this value of the underdog in his epic poem – three times out of four that Revenge is directly named, she is prefaced with the adjective ‘little’.

It was to be a peculiar and recurring theme of great moments in English history. Even when Great Britain was the greatest imperial power in the world, her survival in the summer of 1940 would depend on ‘the few’. It is not surprising that William Shakespeare, with his genius for reading the signs of the times, should catch this spirit and insert it retrospectively into the account of Henry V’s foray into France and that the lynchpin rallying call should be ‘we few, we happy few’.

The ‘little’ Revenge, therefore, had found a master who most embodied the spirit of her name, more even than Sir Francis Drake, who used the ship in the height of national danger to skulk off in the night after rich pickings. And the ship itself embodied the spirit of a small nation that, although it was to become great, remained always spiritually attached to its relative size – a nation always proud to be a David among Goliaths.

The Cornishman A.L. Rowse was expansive about the significance of this particular incident and how it reflected so closely the mood of the Elizabethan age:

It was the heroic age in our history, when the nation saw great opportunities of expansion and achievement opening before it. Young, fresh, vigorous, full of self-confidence and spirit, it knew how to take them … It was the fact that the opportunities given were so triumphantly taken, our difficulties surmounted in spite of the odds against us, that made the Elizabethan age the heroic age in our history …

It was in the realm of action, at its most heightened and intense moments, that the pure quality of the heroic emerges: that sort of gesture by which a man goes down to posterity for something not only memorable in itself, but in which subsequent ages find significance, inspiration in its defiance, strength in its courage …

Of such was Grenville’s last action in the Revenge. There was never any fight more famous in a nation’s history; never any that was more purely heroic in quality – that mixture of daredevilry, defiance of fate, supreme indifference to consequences, which men admire more than anything, because their own lives are at every point so circumscribed by circumstance, from which there is, save in such moments, no emancipation.¹³

Poets and prose writers have queued up to pay homage to the event, including Sir Francis Bacon:

In the year 1591 was that memorable fight of an English ship called Revenge, under the command of Sir Richard Grenville, memorable (I say) even beyond credit and to the height of some heroical fable: and though it were a defeat, yet it exceeded a victory; being like the act of Samson, that killed more men at his death, than he had done in the time of all his life. This ship, for the space of fifteen hours, sate like a stag amongst hounds at bay, and was sieged and fought with, in turn, by fifteen great ships of Spain, part of a navy of fifty-five ships in all; the rest like abettors looking on afar off. And amongst the fifteen ships that fought, the great San Philippo was one; a ship of fifteen hundred ton, prince of the twelve Sea Apostle, which was right glad when she was shifted off from the Revenge. This brave ship the Revenge, being manned only with two hundred soldiers and marines, whereof eighty lay sick, yet nevertheless after a fight maintained (as was said) of fifteen hours, and two ships of the enemy sunk by her side, besides many more torn and battered and great slaughter of men, never came to be entered, but was taken by composition; the enemies themselves having in admiration the virtue of the commander and the whole tragedy of that ship.¹⁴

The epitaph of Sir Richard Grenville may be echoed in the poetry of Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay, although intended for a different hero in dire straits:

Then out spake brave Horatius,

The Captain of the Gate:

‘To every man upon this earth

Death cometh soon or late.

And how can man die better

Than facing fearful odd,

For the ashes of his fathers,

And the temples of his Gods?

Now who will stand on either hand

And keep the bridge with me?’¹⁵

And what of the ship itself, her master having succumbed to his wounds? Manned by foreign hands, the little ship was still to live up to her name. The Spaniards could hardly believe their good fortune in capturing the prize ship of the Navy Royal:

This Admiral-galleon was one of the best there were in England; they called her the Revenge. She was the flagship that carried Drake to Corunna … she carried 42 pieces of artillery of bronze without three which were given to another ship a few days before, the 20 on her lower deck of 40 to 60 quintals, and the remaining 22 of 20 to 30 quintals, all good.¹⁶

Their possession of this prize was not to last for long for, just as at the time of the Armada, ‘God blew and they were scattered’, so after the capture of the Revenge all the vengeance of God seemed to rain down upon the Spanish fleet, manifested in the worst storm in living memory, which struck with the force of a cyclone – creation itself seemed to have been blotted out during this seven-to eight-day onslaught which wrought havoc among Bazán’s naval craft and even worse among the flotas.

Revenge was among the many ships cast away in the storm:

near to the Island of Tercera, where it brake in a hundred pieces and sunk to the ground, having in her 70 men gallegos, Biscayans and others, with some of the captive Englishmen, whereof but one was saved that got up upon the cliffs alive, and had his body and head all wounded, and he being on shore brought us the news, desiring to be shriven, and thereupon presently died.¹⁷

At a time when the hand of God was seen to be in everything, before the age of science or rational explanation, the demise of Grenville, the Revenge and the natural events that accompanied it were steeped in ominous significance:

that the taking of the Revenge was justly revenged upon them, and not by the might or force of man, but by the power of God, as some of them openly said in the Isle of Tercera, that they believed verily God would consume them, and that he took part with Lutherans and heretics: saying further that so soon as they had thrown the dead body of the Vice admiral Sir Richard Grenville overboard, they verily thought that as he had a devilish faith and religion, and therefore the devils loved him, so he presently sunk into the bottom of the sea, and down into Hell, where he raised up all the devils to the Revenge of his death.¹⁸

The Grenvilles had grown up in Cornwall over the centuries, ancestors of Norman adventurers; and Revenge itself had grown up in ancient forests of England, its planks formed from the branches of vast forest titans with immeasurable girths. Solid, immovable, rooted in the soil of their country, both man and oaken ship were slow to succumb: Grenville, like an oak tree that takes many blows of the axe before its branches and trunk eventually fall with a crash into the undergrowth; and the Revenge itself, unsinkable except by an act of God Himself. Both, far from England, went to their watery graves at the bottom of the stormy sea.

Not only strong and solid, but fast and furious, the Revenge, with its greyhound lines, seemed to represent all the great potential of the Elizabethan era. Light and deadly, a ship for fast movement and adventure, she also proved at the last to be made of stern stuff.

The Revenge

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I

At Flores, in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay,

And a pinnace, like a flutter’d bird, came flying from far away;

‘Spanish ships of war at sea! we have sighted fifty-three!’

Then sware Lord Thomas Howard: ‘ ’Fore God I am no coward;

But I cannot meet them here, for my ships are out of gear,

And the half my men are sick. I must fly, but follow quick.

We are six ships of the line; can we fight with fifty-three?’

II

Then spake Sir Richard Grenville: ‘I know you are no coward;

You fly them for a moment to fight with them again.

But I’ve ninety men and more that are lying sick ashore.

I should count myself the coward if I left them, my Lord Howard,

To these Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain.’

III

So Lord Howard past away with five ships of war that day,

Till he melted like a cloud in the silent summer heaven;

But Sir Richard bore in hand all his sick men from the land

Very carefully and slow,

Men of Bideford in Devon,

And we laid them on the ballast down below:

For we brought them all aboard,

And they blest him in their pain, that they were not left to Spain,

To the thumb-screw and the stake, for the glory of the Lord.

IV

He had only a hundred seamen to work the ship and to fight,

And he sailed away from Flores till the Spaniard came in sight,

With his huge sea-castles heaving upon the weather bow.

‘Shall we fight or shall we fly?

Good Sir Richard, tell us now,

For to fight is but to die!

There’ll be little of us left by the time this sun be set.’

And Sir Richard said again: ‘We be all good Englishmen.

Let us bang these dogs of Seville, the children of the devil,

For I never turn’d my back upon Don or devil yet.’

V

Sir Richard spoke and he laugh’d, and we roar’d a hurrah and so

The little Revenge ran on sheer into the heart of the foe,

With her hundred fighters on deck, and her ninety sick below;

For half of their fleet to the right and half to the left were seen,

And the little Revenge ran on thro’ the long sea-lane between.

VI

Thousands of their soldiers look’d down from their decks and laugh’d,

Thousands of their seamen made mock at the mad little craft

Running on and on, till delay’d

By their mountain-like San Philip that, of fifteen hundred tons,

And up-shadowing high above us with her yawning tiers of guns,

Took the breath from our sails, and we stay’d.

VII

And while now the great San Philip hung above us like a cloud

Whence the thunderbolt will fall

Long and loud,

Four galleons drew away

From the Spanish fleet that day.

And two upon the larboard and two upon the starboard lay,

And the battle-thunder broke from them all.

VIII

But anon the great San Philip, she bethought herself and went,

Having that within her womb that had left her ill content;

And the rest they came aboard us, and they fought us hand to hand,

For a dozen times they came with their pikes and musqueteers,

And a dozen times we shook ’em off as a dog that shakes his ears

When he leaps from the water to the land.

IX

And the sun went down, and the stars came out far over the summer sea,

But never a moment ceased the fight of the one and the fifty-three.

Ship after ship, the whole night long, their high-built galleons came,

Ship after ship, the whole night long, with her battle-thunder and flame;

Ship after ship, the whole night long, drew back with her dead and her shame.

For some were sunk and many were shatter’d and so could fight us no more –

God of battles, was ever a battle like this in the world before?

X

For he said, ‘Fight on! fight on!’

Tho’ his vessel was all but a wreck;

And it chanced that, when half of the short summer night was gone,

With a grisly wound to be drest he had left the deck,

But a bullet struck him that was dressing it suddenly dead,

And himself he was wounded again in the side and the head,

And he said, ‘Fight on! fight on!’

XI

And the night went down, and the sun smiled out far over the summer sea,

And the Spanish fleet with broken sides lay round us all in a ring;

But they dared not touch us again, for they fear’d that we still could sting,

So they watch’d what the end would be.

And we had not fought them in vain,

But in perilous plight were we,

Seeing forty of our poor hundred were slain,

And half of the rest of us maim’d for life

In the crash of the cannonades and the desperate strife;

And the sick men down in the hold were most of them stark and cold,

And the pikes were all broken or bent, and the powder was all of it spent;

And the masts and the rigging were lying over the side;

But Sir Richard cried in his English pride:

‘We have fought such a fight for a day and a night

As may never be fought again!

We have won great glory, my men!

And a day less or more

At sea or ashore,

We die – does it matter when?

Sink me the ship, Master Gunner – sink her, split her in twain!

Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain!’

XII

And the gunner said, ‘Ay, ay,’ but the seamen made reply:

‘We have children, we have wives,

And the Lord hath spared our lives.

We will make the Spaniard promise, if we yield, to let us go;

We shall live to fight again and to strike another blow.’

And the lion there lay dying, and they yielded to the foe.

XIII

And the stately Spanish men to their flagship bore him then,

Where they laid him by the mast, old Sir Richard caught at last,

And they praised him to his face with their courtly foreign grace;

But he rose upon their decks, and he cried:

‘I have fought for Queen and Faith like a valiant man and true;

I have only done my duty as a man is bound to do.

With a joyful spirit I Sir Richard Grenville die!’

And he fell upon their decks, and he died.

XIV

And they stared at the dead that had been so valiant and true,

And had holden the power and glory of Spain so cheap

That he dared her with one little ship and his English few;

Was he devil or man? He was devil for aught they knew,

But they sank his body with honor down into the deep.

And they mann’d the Revenge with a swarthier alien crew,

And away she sail’d with her loss and long’d for her own;

When a wind from the lands they had ruin’d awoke from sleep,

And the water began to heave and the weather to moan,

And or ever that evening ended a great gale blew,

And a wave like the wave that is raised by an earthquake grew,

Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts and their flags,

And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shatter’d navy of Spain,

And the little Revenge herself went down by the island crags To be lost evermore in the main.¹⁹

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